We begin last night’s episode of Mad Men, titled “For Immediate Release,” in a situation that has become common in season six: an alcohol-free meeting at SCDP. Joan, Pete, and Bert Cooper face off against a grayish man, the underwriter who may (or may not) finance their IPO, with coffee cups on the conference room table before them. The scene is tense. Will the underwriter support their move, and at the right share price?

There is a bit of an argument–the underwriter says $9, Bert was hoping for $12–but when it ends and Bert shows him out, Pete and Joan rejoice: They go straight for the whiskey, which they knock back at once.

“You’re flushed,” Pete says, sounding creepy as usual.

“I drank too fast,” says Joan, and when Pete offers her another, she turns it down: “I can hardly walk and you know it.” Yes–yes, he does.

But this is the way people drink in this episode: decisively. It’s a nice change from the past few episodes, where drinking, and especially drinking liquor and cocktails, functioned as a kind of shorthand for furtive retreat into the past. In “For Immediate Release,” drinking is an aggressive act, and yet one tinged with humor–it’s devilishly fun. Here’s Roger Sterling, proving he can still close a deal, targeting potential clients through his new girlfriend Daisy, who works at the Northwest Airlines first-class lounge, and then, once he has the attention of, say, a GM muckety-muck, telling Daisy without hesitation, “I’ll have a glass of water with an onion, and bring him a double Jim Beam.” Beautiful!

Yet another awkward dinner with the Draper family (Credit: Michael Yarish/AMC)

Then, when Bert Cooper announces the IPO will definitely happen, and at $11 a share, we get to find out what he drinks. “Do you have a brandy?” he asks Pete. Uh, no. “Spirits of elderflower?” The St. Germain revolution is decades away. “Surprise me!”

And let’s not forget Megan’s mother, Marie, who’s drinking wine–white, red, whatever you’ve got–as fast as she can, straight from the bottle even, as a shameless sign of her spite. This is the kind of Mad Men drinking I like to see.

But when he sees Don drinking an Old Fashioned (as always), he decides to skip his usual esoteric order. “One of those,” he says. It’s as if by doing so he’s brought himself up to Don’s level, or at least a subtle signal that he’s about to earn Don’s respect as an equal: a creative genius hamstrung by his midsize-agency background. And now that they’re drinking the same thing, they can do what’s about to become the new fashion in the ad biz: merge and dominate. I’ll drink to that.